


Good Enough

by Anonymous



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: (sort of), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Bisexual Male Character, Class Differences, Complicated Relationships, Cunnilingus, Edging, Light Dom/sub, Love Triangles, Multi, Polyamory, Porn with Feelings, under-negotiated polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-28
Updated: 2021-01-28
Packaged: 2021-03-12 01:28:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28752195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: She wants to feel defiant and strong and demanding, wants to feel good enough to be in Duran’s bed the way she felt good enough to stand in the Proving Grounds.-Natia Brosca has always known that her lover is hiding something from her. She just isn't expecting it to bethatwhen she finds out.
Relationships: Male Aeducan/Female Brosca (Dragon Age), Male Aeducan/Female Brosca/Gorim Saelac, Male Aeducan/Gorim Saelac
Comments: 2
Kudos: 1
Collections: Nobody Expects the Dragon Age Smutquisition





	Good Enough

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jarakrisafis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jarakrisafis/gifts).



We make a odd pair, the two of us, Natia thinks, taking a swig from her waterskin. It’s warm—as to be expected at the end of the day, when she’s been carrying it with her this whole time—and it feels stagnant and musty in her mouth, but it’s not the worst thing she’s ever drunk. Two Grey Wardens, an exiled prince and a duster thief, a woman who came from nothing and a man who lost everything.

Duran doesn’t seem to notice her staring. Instead, he stays almost completely still, a tankard in hand as he stares into the campfire, watching the flames. He looks kinder in the low warm light of camp. The sharpness of his high cheekbones is made softer, the pale straw blond of his hair washed out by the faded red of his tunic. Right now, it’s easy to forget he was a deep lord, born with a golden spoon in his mouth.

Natia thought he was a bastard for a long time. Sometimes she still thinks he’s a bit of a bastard.

The exiled prince—and _Stone_ , sometimes the fact she can say those words and have them be true makes Natia feel like nothing in comparison—is still as a statue, but there’s something alive flickering in his eyes, in a way there hadn’t been when she and Duncan had found him in the Deep Roads. For a long time, Natia hadn’t understood why Duncan had chosen to recruit Duran. Down there, in the low light, wearing nothing but rags and holding a Ages-old sword, he’d looked ready to die. _Sod, he’d looked like he’d accepted he was already dead_. Maybe—in the memories of Orzammar, for all the nothing they were worth—he was. Natia hadn’t trusted him to begin with and when he’d looked at her around the campfire that night—eyes blank as a corpse—she’d trusted him even less.

But that had been before Ostagar. Before Lothering. Before the Circle. Before everything. _Before them._

Whatever ‘they’ are.

Duran is still hiding something from her. She’d be a fool not to know it, and fools don’t last long in Dust Town. Right before she’d kissed him for the first time—on the long walk back from the Brecilian Forest to camp—she’d asked him about it. Asked him why he’d joined them and been conscripted when it had been clear he’d be willing to lie down in the Deep Roads and died. And he’d paused for a moment, and in that moment she’d felt something in her heart catch. Heat had risen from her stomach to her chest, and she’d been unable to keep her eyes off his mouth, close enough that she could smell the fragrance of the wine he’d been drinking on their way back, sweet and herbal.

“I promised somebody,” he’d said eventually, “That I’d survive for their sake. And find them on the surface.”

“A lover?” she’d asked, breathlessly. And then, “Have you?”

He never said anything in return. But he’d looked so much smaller than normal then that—for once—he’d seemed just like an ordinary man. When Natia had kissed him—pressing her lips against his, closed and chaste—he’d hesitated for a second. And then he’d kissed her back, just as hesitant and soft.

Natia always wonders if Duran is thinking about the lover-who-went-unspoken when he gazes into the fire. And, _dust to dunkels_ , she does not like the way that makes her feels. She can feel the rhythm of her heartbeat in the palms of her clenched hands, and she hates it. Her first reaction is that she has no right to feel this way, because whatever life Duran had before her and whatever deep lord’s daughter he misses is none of her concern. Her second is that she has no reason to feel this way, because there is no going back. Whoever took a place in her lover’s heart before her is gone now.

When she stands up from the patch of grass she’s claimed as her own and walks over to Duran, she know it won’t fix things. But it’ll make her feel better, and that’s what she wants right now.

“Hey _salroka_ ,” she says, and there’s still always a little jolt of joy in her heart at being able to call a man who was once a prince that word, “I’m heading to my tent. Want to join me?”

Duran looks away from the fire and towards her, and when he smiles it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “I’d love to.”

* * *

He kisses her like he means it, at least. His tongue is in her mouth and his hand cups her cheek as their bodies press together. The night air is cold and still, but where Natia’s skin touches Duran’s she feels warm. Her tent was made for somebody human-sized, and while it leaves her colder when she sleeps alone, it means the two of them can kiss like this, sat upright under the heavy canvas.

“You’re beautiful,” Duran says when they part for air, brushing a strand of bright red hair out of Natia’s face. He says it like he means it too, and Natia’s heart aches with how much she wishes she believed that were true. “So fucking beautiful, Nat.”

“Damn right I am,” she says, and kisses him again. He’s rougher this time, his mouth open, and Nat can taste their shared breath and feel the steady thud of their combined heartbeat as the two of them fumble to get the rest of their clothes off. He’s a good looking man—broad shoulders and a hairy chest—and her hands are on him as quickly as his are on her. He cups one of her freckled breasts, squeezing gently, and her lips part before she lets out a low moan, and it’s a little bit performance, but only a little.

“Want to taste me?” she asks, and Duran lets out a breathy gasp that turns into a moan.

“More than anything.”

Natia is not the kind of person who has ever called it ‘making love’. And she doesn’t now, but when Duran looks up at her between her legs with something soft and wanting in his eyes, she thinks she understands a little of why some people do. His lips are soft and warm and his mouth eager, and when he’s like this with his tongue swirling around her clit and her hand pulling him by the hair, he feels like hers. And—by that fucking Stone that the castes seem to place so much standing in—she wishes he always felt like hers. She wishes she didn’t have to share him, not with the Wardens, not with whoever it was who had him in the past.

She tugs on his hair a little rougher.

“Harder,” she means for it to be barked like an order—and she makes a note of the way Duran stiffens and then shivers a little at the fact it’s commanded—but it still comes out a little softer than she wants. She wants to feel defiant and strong and demanding, wants to feel good enough to be in Duran’s bed the way she felt good enough to stand in the Proving Grounds. “Make me come.”

Despite the tenderness—or perhaps because of it—he does as he’s told. Natia knows what he likes. He likes it when she squirms and moans under his touch, when—despite the cold of the night—her body glistens with sweat, when her hands clench into fists around their blankets and her eyes screw tightly shut. It would be so easy to give it to him too. Duran spreads her thighs with rough hands, calloused from work for the first time in his pampered life, and lowers his mouth to her. His lips and tongue are wet and warm when he starts to swirl circles around her and it would be so, _so_ easy to give in and ride the feeling, to buck her hips and moan and writhe beneath him. But then it would be over too soon, and Natia still hasn’t managed to shake the feeling in her gut each time they fuck that _this will be the last time_. So she resists it the whole way, and when she feels her body finally betray her—her muscles starting to clench, ready for release—she buries a hand in the blond curls of Duran’s hair and pulls him away from her.

She’s breathless. They’re both breathless. In the moments before her body slowly relaxes again, Natia briefly wonders what it would be like to have Duran on a leash, so he has no choice but to go where he commands. He looks up at her with wide eyes that remind Natia of a stray puppy, his mouth dripping wet. She can’t help but laugh a little at the sight, and it’s maybe a little cruel, but she knows he likes that too. He flushes even hotter, and she can feel the heat radiating off his skin as she pushes his head back down. 

* * *

Natia is an early riser. The first few months on the surface, she was even more of one. She supposes it makes sense—she’s never learnt to associated light levels with the wax and wane of the day, after all. The thick canvas of her tent keeps most of the dawn’s light out, but there’s enough coming through that even without the birdsong, she knows it’s morning. When she turns to her side—still half asleep—she realises she is alone in her bedroll.

Dawn on the surface feels a way that the stale light in Orzammar never did. The two moons still hang faint in the sky, but they are surrounded by rosy pinks and sandy yellows rather than the dark blues of the night. Once, Natia and Leske were tasked with opening up a length of the Deep Roads using explosive charges, and the dawn reminds Natia of that, except that it’s as if colour has exploded across the sky rather than rock. Even months after coming to the surface, it still takes her breath away.

She stumbles on Duran a little walk away from the main camp, half an hour after waking when she’s found it in her to rise from her blankets and put on her gambeson. He’s sitting down by a stream—perched precariously on a large slab of stone—with a bowl in hand. That in itself is not surprising; she knows Duran misses the hot baths and pools of Orzammar. A cold stream is not a perfect alternative, but at least the water is clean. What is odd is the way that he’s sitting, just holding the bowl in his hands rather than using it to wash, concentrating on something in the water. He’s concentrating so hard that when she walks up to him and sits beside him, he jumps a little.

“You alright Salroka?” she asks, even though she knows the answer is no.

“Of course. Thank you,” he says, stiffly. Natia knows he’s lying. Even if she hadn’t found him out here alone like this, she knows that he reverts to stiff noble formalities in his speech when he’s lying. She has to wonder how he managed to navigate court life sometimes, what with all its negotiation and backstabbing and intricacies. Maybe he did then what he does now, and just let some things remain unspoken.

“That’s bullshit and we both know it,” she says, placing a hand on his thigh. He doesn’t brush her away. “What’s troubling you.”

There’s a long silence, and Natia can hear the morning birdsong and the babbling of the stream.

“Sometimes I feel,” Duran begins, before he pauses, as if he’s choosing his words carefully, “Like there’s nobody else who knows how this feels. To have the weight of the world on your shoulders. Do you know what I mean?”

Natia looks at her boots.

“Nobody,” he says, again.

* * *

She understands what the two men were the moment she sees them make eye contact. Duran has always avoided going to Denerim up until now, claiming that there’s always a chance a guard who was once part of a diplomatic attaché in Orzammar will recognise him. It’s always sounded like bullshit, but Natia is fond enough of him that she’ll let him get away with a little bullshit. Natia likes Denerim. It’s nice to walk through a marketplace without fear of guards, to have the mark on her face mean absolutely nothing to anyone, to have her gold speak for itself. Denerim’s marketplace is full of mud and shouting and goods that Natia has never seen before, and there’s so much to see and explore that she’s never paid much thought or attention to the dwarven merchant that stands in the corner and advertises his wares.

That was a fucking mistake, is all she can think, something bitter rising in her stomach as she watches shock and relief and joy and regret flash through both his and Duran's eyes at the same time. She knows. And she’s not sure if she’s more angry with herself for not thinking about the possibility, with Alistair for claiming to be too sick to come to Denerim and making Duran take his place, or with whoever-this-man-is for what he had with Duran before she did. He doesn’t even seem to notice her when he starts to speak, like she is nothing more than set dressing.

“Gorim,” Duran says as he steps forward, breathlessly, as if he is praying to the Stone.

“My Lord Aeducan?” the man—Gorim—says, and the fact that he uses Duran’s old name and his old title is worse. Because here, up on the surface, they are all meant to be beyond that. They are all meant to be nothing. And this man is treating Duran like he is still is his old self and her like she is nothing, and Duran is letting him. “I knew you survived. I never stopped believing in it.”

The two men talk. They talk about a dead king that Natia never knew and a family legacy of the kind she will never see, and Natia says nothing. When the merchant—Gorim—mentions a wife Natia sees Duran flinch, and she hates the little jolt of satisfaction she gets from that because she knows that this man’s wife deserves better than being a second option. _She_ deserves better than being a second option.

After far too long, Duran introduces her as “my fellow Warden, Natia Brosca”. Gorim’s eyes narrow at her, and she can tell he’s studying the tattoo on her cheek. She scowls back at him, with all the duster rage she can find within herself.

“You loved him,” she says plainly as she and Duran lie side by side in bed that evening. She’s not looking at his expression, but from the way he stiffens next to her, she can tell she’s hit a nerve. She shuffles, and a few strands of straw poke at her through the thin mattress cloth. It was kind of Gorim—she supposes—to offer her and Duran a place to rest for the night. Even if the mattress is worn and straw filled, it’s better than the thin bedrolls over cold ground the two of them have become accustomed to in the months since they left Orzammar.

“I did,” comes the reply, eventually.

Gorim was kind to offer them a bed for the night, and his wife—Varla—was kinder still with her offer to feed them. She’d struggled with the pans a little, the linen of her dress stretched uncomfortable around her belly, and Gorim had helped her. It had been odd, Natia supposed, to watch something like that, an act so intimate and mundane and easy.

“Do you still love him?” she asks. Duran doesn’t answer.

That night, Natia dreams of her and Duran in a kitchen. There’s no round belly in her dress—because apparently even in her dreams she knows there’s no chance of that happening, not with them both being Wardens—but apart from that it is much the same. Intimate and mundane and easy.

* * *

“Did you know?” Natia asks, sitting at the breakfast table the next morning. For once, she’s risen from bed earlier than Duran, and when she made her way downstairs the only person in the kitchen was Varla. They’ve made amiable conversation for a good half hour while the porridge cooks—Natia asking about Varla’s health during her pregnancy, taking care not to ask any specifics about the relationship she has with her husband, and Varla asking about Natia’s adventures as a Warden, taking care not to ask any specifics about her life before she left Orzammar—and Natia supposes if there’s any time to ruin the pleasantries it’s now. “About the two of them?”

Varla stirs the porridge pot and says nothing, and for a moment Natia wonders if she should have been more explicit about what she meant, or conversely, if she should have said nothing at all. But then Varla speaks, slow and hesitant, as if she’s a deep lord admitting to fixing a Proving.

“Gorim said some things. I worked others out.”

“Does it trouble you?”

Varla smiles over the pot, although the corners of her eyes don’t crease properly. “Are you asking me because you want to know, or because it bothers you?”

It’s a good question. Natia can’t answer it.

* * *

Natia was never a noble hunter, but she’s picked up enough tricks from her sister that when she delivers a proposal to Gorim a few days later, she says it sweetly enough that he almost doesn’t seem suspicious of her. _Almost_ doesn’t. Natia is still a brand. She may never set foot in Dust Town again, but that’ll be true to the day she dies, and deep in the marrow of his bones, Gorim is still warrior caste. It’ll always be a little distrustful between them. But she’s charm enough to smooth over the roughest edges between them, and when he looks sideways and Varla gives him a nod of approval, it smooths them more.

Her proposal is a bad idea, and even though Natia is following through on it, she knows it. The two of them taking Duran to bed together will not fix everything, and there is a good chance it will not fix anything. But there’s a part of her that still hopes it will be what finally makes her sit comfortably with Duran’s past and present and future, and where she fits into all three. And even though there’s no love lost between the two of them, Gorim is handsome in his own way, she supposes.

The two of them take up space at near opposite ends of the bedroom—her by the door, him sitting on the edge of the bed—and their clothes are still on when Duran comes back up to the room. It’s dark outside, even if there’s enough light in the city that Natia knows she wouldn’t be able to see the stars if she went outside and looked up. Duran looks like he knows to expect something, even if he’s not sure what—maybe Varla hinted at it to him—and when he steps into the bedroom and sees them both waiting for him, his eyes widen a little bit. She steps forward, cups his cheek with her hand, and pulls him into a quick kiss that’s only a little possessive.

“Come to bed with us.”

The bedframe wasn’t built for three. Natia can tell because it creaks under their weight when they try to find a comfortable position. The three of them settle on her lying on her back with Duran both between her legs and bent down in front of Gorim. Natia likes this, being able to cup his face and kiss him, being able to slide her fingers into Duran’s mouth at the same time as Gorim slips his own oil slicked fingers inside the Warden. Natia doesn’t like Gorim and there’s a good chance she never will, but she likes this at least; the two of them fucking Duran together.

“How many fingers have you managed to get inside him?” Natia finds herself asking. Gorim chuckles, and there’s something cruel enough in it that Duran moans around her fingers.

“Now, or ever? It’s three now, but he’s managed all of them.” And now _that’s_ a pretty thought, Duran stretched out over a hand. Natia lets out a heavy breath, and she’ll admit to a slightest hint of a moan in it.

“You ever put more than fingers inside him?”

Natia makes Duran slide his cock inside her before Gorim sinks into him, and she’s so wet that the movement is slick and easy. Duran’s teeth clamp down on his lip as he bites back a moan, only to have it forced from his lips as he’s stretched open, his cock twitching inside her in response. Natia inhales sharply. It’s a beautiful sight, so beautiful that all she can do for a moment is lie back and watch it happen.

“I love you.” Duran gasps out, eyes screwed tightly shut. Natia runs a hand through his hair, holding it near the roots, and tugs lightly. It feels odd to call the former prince pretty, but he is. And he looks even prettier than normal in the soft glow of the bedroom fire; thick pale hair tousled and messy, plump lips parted as he moans, warm body pressed against hers. Natia doesn’t say ‘I love you’ back but she kisses him, holding him securely by the hair as her tongue enters his mouth. He’s breathless and desperate and pliable under her hands, and when she wraps her legs around him to anchor him to her, she can feel the momentum of Gorim’s hips start to quicken.

“Come for us,” she says, instead. “Both of us.”


End file.
